Data is essential to all organizations. The data relevant to organizations includes data produced by the organizations, data consumed by the organizations, and data analyzed by the organizations. In many instances, organizations have spent many years (if not decades) collecting and storing data on traditional file servers. Sometimes, these file servers are identity controlled and include rigorous business processes set up around the servers to control and protect the data with antivirus software, audit/control software, and backup and restore software.
Data is big business these days and one does not have to look very far to see evidence in this by the organizational heavy weights with a presence in the data storage business: IBM, Microsoft, HP, Oracle, Google, Facebook, and others.
However, to date storage services are: generally only available via tightly coupled heavy weight protocols; not directly accessible via lightweight clients such as mobile phones and tablets; locked inside corporate firewalls; and not inherently searchable (not indexed). Evidence of this exists by the large amount of data that is currently just available via mounted or mapped drives (NCP (Netware Control Program), CIFS (Common Internet File System), NFS (Network File System), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), etc.) and not available via today's web oriented applications.
In fact, today's web access for data is often optimized around technology that focuses on: indexing, searching, alerting, notifying, sharing, and collaborating. Still further, today's data access focuses on generic interfaces to access the data, which exists in the cloud; rather, then in legacy hierarchical file systems.
Many technologies exists today in the industry to make data access generic and location independent (Amazon S3, Dropbox, Sky Drive, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.); however, these technologies all share one significant problem and that is they all work on new data and not with existing legacy data. As a result, unless an enterprise wants to go through a significant data port, years of knowledge represented in its legacy data remains largely inaccessible via modern platforms and devices.